Spare a thought for the accidental genius, the teenager who starts a band and suddenly finds himself fêted as the saviour of pop. For a few hours it’s probably quite flattering. But who would want to try to write a song under that sort of pres-sure? How much fun is that?

Quite a lot, it would seem, if you’re Arctic Monkeys. It takes class to steal the show without turning up to the Brits. Yet only a month before the band release what must be the year’s most anticipated album, Favourite Worst Nightmare, Arctic Monkeys pulled it off by filming their thank-yous dressed up as Village People and characters in The Wizard of Oz. A couple of weeks later they even turned up to receive the Best Band gong at the NME Awards. YouTube footage from the event shows Alex Turner in similar spirits, entertaining the notion of a side-project with two of Girls Aloud. Unlike Joss Stone’s Brits display, which rang warning bells before her new record, Arctic Monkeys’ recent appearances have suggested that everything would probably be OK with Favourite Worst Nightmare.

Nevertheless, it’s always nice to get these things confirmed. Last Friday I spent three hours in the Wands-worth HQ of the group’s label, Domino Records. How good is Favourite Worst Nightmare? I had allowed for only two hours. But I needed a further hour to get my head around just how invincibly confident the group sounded.

Lest we forget, this outcome certainly wasn’t guaranteed. You need only look at Alex Turner’s body language a year ago. Like the reluctant subject of his own Truman Show,nothing could have prepared him for the degree to which he would be scrutinised. He was compared to artists his father was more likely to have heard of – John Cooper Clarke, Paul Weller, Elvis Costello.

A fortnight before I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor shot to No 1, Turner told The Times that the comparisons had prompted him to go out and buy records by those people. How frightening must it have seemed to him, having heard Oliver’s Army and Going Underground for the first time, to be told that he was already that good? It would, perhaps, result in a sort of creative paralysis. Arctic Monkeys have never had the chance to dictate the pace or the terms of their ascent. That has been done for them by the fans who distributed MP3s of their songs – effectively forcing the group to knock out their debut album Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not in double-quick time.

Speaking about that period in this week’s NME, Turner concedes that the changes to his life affected his writing. “When we first started going away to write new songs I probably did write lyrics about a photographer or something like that.” Weeks before the departure of the bassist Andy Nicholson they played a stodgy self-decon-structing new song, Who The F*** are the Arctic Monkeys, in Rotherham, and a lone voice called out: “Play sum-mat good, you t***.” Turner kept his head down.

As well he might. That’s what lower middle-class boys do when confronted with p*****-up Biffa Bacons in starched Fred Perrys.

He might be the poet laureate of the Nuts generation, but it wasn’t a title he asked for. Neither, you imagine, does he care for the scrutiny of the Late Review gang. If he belonged wholly to one tribe or the other, Turner wouldn’t have been able to write a song such as A Certain Romance – his poignant paean to small-town indolence that oscillates between anger, resignation and, crucially, affection for his underachieving peers. It’s that apartness that you wanted him to keep intact throughout the madness.

Happily, Turner’s inability to switch off and join in has allowed him to deploy a sort of tactical truculence, used to best effect at the Q Awards, when he pointed out the absurdity of honouring Take That with something called the Idol Award: “Even I know Take That were bollocks,” he said from the podium.

So much then, for fears that Arctic Monkeys had lost their sense of humour. At Christmas there was a suggestion of renewed confidence in the camp, with a video message from the Santa-attired drummer Matt Helders, improvising surreally on the theme of home security. Then came their Brits scene-stealer.

Where did it all go right, then? Whether you know it or not, you inherit some of the values of the people who put your records out. In 1997, Oasis’s Be Here Now was undivorceable from the blizzard of cocaine that consumed Creation Records at that time.

But it works the other way too. Think of 2-Tone between 1979 and 1980 or Island from 1966 to 1972. Favourite Worst Nightmare sounds not just like an Arctic Monkeys record, but a Domino Records record. The affirmative clatter of the new track Fluorescent Adolescent isn’t dissimilar to that found on Domino’s recent Orange Juice compilation The Glasgow School, while the new single Brian-storm rattles to a similarly unexpected rhythm – Dick Dale reimagined for the icy surf of Whitby.

It’s unlikely that a major label would have let their young charges choose the new-rave ringmaster James Ford, who last produced the Klaxons, as producer, but his modus operandi has yielded dividends. Presiding over the recordings in East London’s Miloco studios, Ford ensured that sessions for the album were punctuated by immersion in the local nightlife.

The results were immediate. Having entered the studio with half a dozen songs, the group wrote several more in the studio. In the words of Matt Helders: “James was deejaying loads in the evening so we’d go out and . . . have a dance.”

On new tunes such as This House Is a Circus, Ford’s love of those funky, early-Eighties Brooklynites ESG has clearly rubbed off on Helders and the new bassist Nick O’Malley. Consequently, the characters who pop up in Turner’s vignettes come with extra musical muscle.

Elsewhere, though, some of the best songs allow Turner the space to do the thing he seems to enjoy best of all. “Even if somehow he could have shown you the place you wanted,” he sings on a bittersweet paean to young love, The Only Ones Who Know, “Well, I’m sure you could have made it that bit better on your own.”

Dwelling on the major life decisions that people make has become a forté. But then perhaps it always was. It would explain why he seemed to spend much of last year in an anxious daydream.

Brianstorm is released on Apr 16, Favourite Worst Nightmare on Apr 23, both on Domino.

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